It's nearly always piracy. Full quality anime is rarely ever available for downloaded purchase. Yes, there are examples, but the percentage is so low that...

Kionon wrote:Downloading is seen as easiest for AMV beginners. Not only does the author of this guide frown on it, downloading footage is against the AnimeMusicVideos.org code of editing ethics. This bears repeating:

Using downloaded footage in AMVs is against the AnimeMusicVideos.org Code of Editing Ethics.

Now, aside from the ethical views of the community, there are practical reasons not to use downloaded footage:

First off there is the issue of finding it, especially if you are using a popular, and licensed anime. Then there is the issue of quality. You may well now have better quality than a capture card could produce, but often you have to contend with subtitles or logos, etc.

If you choose to ignore the AMV Code of Ethics, at the very least do your best to find the highest quality you can. Raws are preferable for unreleased material. If you must use fansubs, then at least crop out the subs. And please, please, please do not discuss downloaded footage, where to obtain it, how you used it, how to deal with it. The community is very much aware that it exists.

The first rule of using downloaded footage is that you don't talk about downloaded footage.

It used to be that downloaded footage was typically poorer quality than what you could get off the dvds or whatever. Sadly this is no longer always the case. So yea, at this point its mostly just a "its piracy" thing.

Following on from what Zarx said, most rippers are really bad at it, and the ones who are good do weird things which will fuck you over later on. Easier if more annoying to just use legit footage even if it needs manual correction work. TBH most available downloadable footage is passable, but you can generally do better if you rip it yourself.

Mister Hatt wrote:Following on from what Zarx said, most rippers are really bad at it, and the ones who are good do weird things which will fuck you over later on. Easier if more annoying to just use legit footage even if it needs manual correction work. TBH most available downloadable footage is passable, but you can generally do better if you rip it yourself.

But some of them are also like, batshit crazy about quality. I once saw a group literally go "Yeah, with all our filters and recompression and stuff, the noise in the source material, our encodes were larger than the original streams from the Blu-Ray. So here, we just muxed the video and audiostream into an MKV container with pretty softsubs instead."

To be fair the ones who do that kinda shit are crazy about PERCEIVED quality but actually ruin it, most of the time. If there is a group who can fix something AND make it better at the same time, I'd like to meet them, but I've not seen this happen without secret access to the original masters yet.